Manage your subscription

First fossil of fish that crawled onto land discovered

By Bob Holmes

Missing link

IT WAS one of the most important events of the last 400 million years&colon; the moment our fishy ancestors began hauling themselves onto dry land. Now a fossil from the very beginning of that crucial transition has been found in the remote Arctic.

Palaeontologists didn’t previously have a decent fossil representing the intermediate between finned fish and four-footed land animals, or tetrapods. The new animal has been named Tiktaalik after suggestions from Inuit elders in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, where the fossil was found. The name means “large freshwater fish”, and before …